Tom Shippey

Agonistic, aleatory, vertiginous, mimetic: those are four classes of game, or more accurately four game-elements which can be combined in different ways to create different genres. Mimetic games, obviously, are games in which the players pretend to be someone or something else. In their developed form we don’t call these ‘games’ any more, but ‘plays’, and furthermore hardly any of us now participate in them. We watch them all the time, and that gives one kind of fun, but the fun of mimesis itself is much rarer – regarded, even, with some suspicion. Charades are no longer popular; and while it’s OK for little boys to run round wearing Liverpool shirts or shouting ‘I’ll be Trevor Francis,’ this is strongly frowned upon for even slightly bigger boys. One remembers the games teacher in Kes who ran the whole football session so he could pretend he was Bobby Charlton. Everybody does this in their heads, just like Walter Mitty, but let it show and it’s classified as perverse, immature, not an acceptable form of fun at all.

Brian Aldiss gives his definition of Science Fiction on page one of Chapter One of a five-hundred-page volume. This is admirably bold of him – more timorous scholars tuck their definitions away inconspicuously, or else develop complex excuses for not giving any – as well as being admirably genial. After all, says Aldiss, the definition may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter: ‘we can modify it as we go along.’ The definition is as follows: ‘Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode.’ There is no doubt that this is in the right area. Compare, for instance, Darko Suvin’s now famous definition of Science Fiction as ‘a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’, and note the buried parallels of ‘science’ and ‘cognition’, of ‘imaginative framework’ and ‘Gothic mode’. Still, almost any definition of Science Fiction would be in the right area – unless written by a Martian. How precisely correct is Aldiss’s? Specifically, does the genre not strain the notion of ‘Gothic’ too far? And as for the notion of a genre centred on ‘a definition of mankind’, does that not look – remembering Star Wars and Mr Spock – by some way too ambitious? Is Aldiss not, as he was in this book’s 1973 precursor, Billion Year Spree, a trifle over-persuaded by Mary Shelley?’

Professor Ladurie declares, near the beginning of this immensely detailed volume: ‘I hope in this study to bring to life the country people themselves.’ Such a reconstruction, he thinks, is bound to be fraught with difficulty, since so little attention has been focused on this stubborn main stratum of the pre-industrial population, the food producers themselves: ‘we know much more about “the way of life” of the Magdalenian hunters of Pincevent (8800 BC) than about the French peasants of 1450.’ Ladurie seems to be unnecessarily despondent here: this book shows how much there is to know, while his own previous books, especially Montaillou (1975) and Carnival (1979), have excelled in giving down-to-earth detail of an almost journalistic kind about popular risings and establishment repression. However, one can sympathise with his feelings. He is trying to anatomise some seven generations, with an average population of twenty million people, the overwhelming majority from the ‘peasant classes’. And the close, detailed, day-by-day written evidence, strikingly preserved in the Bishop of Pamier’s Inquisition Register, or the anonymous reports of the Archives Départementales de l’Isère, is simply not available. How can a ‘way of life’ be reconstructed?

Science Fiction, it has been said, is always and necessarily a metaphoric reflection of some aspect of contemporary society. This sounds a depressingly goody-goody theory, the kind of thing which harassed critics make up in order to beat off supercilious remarks from colleagues in the common room. It is also all too clearly undisprovable. Even writers like H.P. Lovecraft have to have some contact with fellow humans, and therefore cannot quite keep contemporary society out of their books. The critic pointing at this with cries of justification may still be guilty of spotting the 1 per cent and letting the 99 go by. Is Science Fiction, then, always a metaphoric reflection of (or on) society? And what in this context might ‘metaphoric’ mean?